Are WordPress Freelance Jobs in Danger?

it's up you bunch WordPress nerds in this video I wanted to go over a an episode of syntax FM that I listened to recently where West Boston Scott Solinsky the host of the show talked about how gooeys graphical user interfaces may or may not be taking over certain parts of the web development community specifically the jobs and so I want to do do a quick video on that and how this may or may not affect us in the WordPress community so if you are new to the channel make sure to subscribe and ring the bell to make sure you get notified of my weekly wordpress videos alright let's jump into it [Music] all right let's take a look here so I want to mainly answer the question our freelance wordpress jobs in danger and this goes back to what I said a second ago about the episode of syntax fm or they're talking about graphical user interfaces affecting jobs in our area and are and specifically WordPress kind of seems to be at the Nexus of that and so I want to kind of just go through what I think the actual concern is and you can decide whether or not this actually applies to you so in my opinion there are three types of jobs in the WordPress area there's the theme and plug-in area where as you're creating custom themes and custom plugins whether or not they're for public distribution or if they are for a client on top of that there is the drag-and-drop developer which is essentially installing a plug-in like element or or beaver builder or something like that and dragging and dropping stuff around until the client kind of gets the look and feel that they that they're wanting and then finally headless WordPress which is using WordPress as an API and then having something on the front end to pick up that data and display it such as gatsby so what I have here is I have a chart of the market share for you know some of the most popular content management systems out there and what I want to do is I want to focus on the last five years mainly because it's a nice round number and then also on top of that there is that's one of this that's the year after everything kind of like was launched and so it helps to kind of paint the whole picture of how these things have grown over the past five years so if we look at WordPress it's grown by three point three percent and when you put that into perspective of how much the market share of WordPress is when you are talking number of sites out of all the websites that's a huge number so really good there joomla's gone down by almost 50% Shopify has increased by four hundred and twenty eight percent Drupal's gone down by forty three percent Squarespace has gone up by four hundred and twenty percent and Wix has gone up by six hundred and sixty-six percent over the past five years so those are pretty large numbers in both directions for a lot of these guys so this is mainly kind of just to illustrate kind of what's happening outside of WordPress and hopefully kind of add some perspective to what I'm going to talk about so what do those numbers actually mean it means that WordPress is growing and it's still growing at a very good rate but so is its competition and so what are these services actually doing are that what it what are they competing against in WordPress is space well they're competing against page builders like Elementor beaver builder oxygen and Guttenberg they are also competing against ecommerce plugins that exist inside of WordPress which is like woo commerce wpml downloads all those things that is something that these other companies are like you know what we can do that better and so how does this actually affect you know us as freelancers or us as just WordPress developers in general well I think that if you are the person who is marketing yourself as a drag-and-drop developer it's like you know what that's a lot of work that can be kind of scary let me do that for you let me drag that stuff around let me get you set up on WordPress I can help you get a calendar on there I can get you a gallery and some pages and a blog and let me show you how to do it that kind of space is going to shrink that is going the client pool for that is going to decrease I feel like that's kind of when we talk about the the title of this topic you know our freelance jobs in danger that's the space that I truly feel like is in danger that is the one where you're going to see these places like Wix Squarespace and Shopify start to take people away from that why is that so I think that the reason why drag-and-drop developers are around to begin with is because WordPress can be kind of daunting there's so many videos out there about how to try and get WordPress up and running like there have been hosting companies that try and just like alright 1-click installs and then you can also have you know Elementor installed - that kind of stuff and they're trying to make that that as seamless as possible is as possible but Wix Squarespace and Shopify just kind of have all that bundled in like this is a one-stop shop to get your website up your domain your hosting your your editing experience your blog your your store all that kind of stuff is here just pay us you know a couple bucks a month and we got you covered and so they're making that a much easier process than what how we have it here in WordPress so that's going to take people away and when you look at those numbers that we were just looking at four hundred twenty percent increase four six hundred and sixty-six percent increase like those our numbers are astronomical so that is going to affect those jobs and I think it's going to take a small bite out of custom theme development as well and the reason why that is is because not just because their page builders exist it's more about like that these page builders are starting to become a little bit better at making things customizable they're starting to get smarter so people who would normally be like I need so this done and I can't can't accomplish it inside of this page builder I'm just gonna hire developer didn't just have them do the whole thing for me that is going to be less of a thing but I don't really even know if you're gonna see it that much and then obviously for headless WordPress that's kind of like an enterprise kind of thing unto itself that I don't really think that these page builders are going to take too much of out of if you're using headless WordPress you kind of know what you want from top to bottom and you're not going to get that out of that of these other sites so ultimately with that kind of space shrinking in the drag-and-drop land is that good news or bad news and I think the short answer here is that it is both it is good news and it is bad news the bad news is that you're gonna simply see a decrease in the client pool that's simply less money that is out there for you to go grab and that is tough that is something that is going to be hard to recover from if you don't have other skills to fall back on same with theme and plug-in developers you're going to have a slight decrease in in the client pool simply because those page builders are getting smarter the good news the downsides of Wix Squarespace and Shopify are blaring in my opinion like when you go to Shopify and you set up a store with them at some point you are going to be paying them a percentage of your sales and that can mean a lot of money that is essentially down the drain because you don't own your store and I mean that in quotes like you don't own the things that you know Shopify is is charging you that percentage to essentially take care of payments to be on there that kind of stuff and that's a large chunk of money and then not to mention that the add-ons that they have expire expensive wicks and Squarespace kind of same thing their prices get pretty pricey once once you start getting up there so they and that's forever so that's as long as you've got the site you are having to pay those premiums because they have that kind of those page builders built in on top of that they're templatized for the most part you're gonna start to see like oh you know what this feels like a Squarespace or WIC site or a Shopify store like especially the checkout process like you know almost instantly when you're like on a Shopify checkout so if you're wanting something more custom that's simply going and you want to go off the rails a bit it becomes extremely hard and then that reduces your scalability as a business then on top of that is speed there is just stuff so much stuff that they're trying to handle in these tools these giant tools that speed kind of becomes a parent and a parent issue the further that you kind of get into this and I can't tell you how many times I've been reached out to you about like hey we need help with our site I ask what it's on and they say like Wix and it's like oh well there you go that's why things are starting to get a little bit slow speed is not necessarily the number one thing on and in the mind of those services but the other good news here is that when we have and what I mean by the other downsides having those having downsides means that there's room for us as developers to kind of step in and have a better option that we can offer you know like basically one-time fees essentially it's like we'll build you the site for this much money and you can edit everything that you want and you can it'll be fast and it'll be unique and that's something different that we can offer and I think that's great because that kind of you know that kind of work is now just stuff we don't have to do anymore we're you know people don't really care that they're gonna drop that much money or they're gonna have a templatized site and speed like that wasn't really the job that we wanted anyway well we want to do this custom stuff and this this stuff that we're gonna proud to throw on our portfolio that's kind of what I mean when this is good news and then a the other point is that we now have an opportunity to grow if we are a drag-and-drop developer and we're mainly installing Elementor and we're dragging and dropping stuff around those other tools like quicksand Squarespace are making it way easier to do that so that is now kind of the wake up call I feel like to jump into something a little bit more custom kind of like the stuff that I was talking about unique theme development unique plug-in development etc headless WordPress and all that so basically in conclusion I think that drop dragon dropped jobs are dwindling and they're dwindling fast I think you know over the next you know couple years the pool is going to start you're going to start to notice it that more people are just going to those other services and you're not going to see as many people asking for this type of service I think that if you are in that space it's now is a good time to start learning theme development or some other development in general where you are in there writing code you are doing the kind of stuff that you can't do inside of those drag-and-drop interfaces that's the kind of space where you need somebody to go in and make those custom solutions for clients and there's we always need more developers in that space the big asterisk to all this is that it's not like completely forget about drag-and-drop builders and just kind of hate them or anything like that they still can provide em jobs as well where you are adding customizability to them like for example I'm currently working on a project where it's like we like elementor's interface but we want none of the widgets we want our all custom widgets so creating you know dozens and dozens and dozens of these custom widgets inside of Elementor because they have a very specific you know design system very specific way they want these things to work but they want to be able to drag and drop the stuff in and we that's kind of a cool project in my opinion because they get kind of the customized layouts they get the customized functionality but they get the nice drag-and-drop interface so we as developers can leverage that as something that we now can do but we're doing a lot of code and that is something that you definitely I was kind of my bottom line here is if you don't know how to code you should probably learn how to code in this kind of space so long story short I think that you know dragging dropping and that page builder stuff having somebody be paying somebody to do that for them that's not going to be super long for this world but custom theme and plug-in development headless WordPress those topics are they're gonna be the ones that I would put my money on right now so I really want to know what you guys think about this this is again just my opinion you know and what do I know I just have you know kind of talking about what I think and so I would really like to hear what you guys have to think about this one leave a comment in the comment section below do you think drag-and-drop developers have a job five years from now ten years from now do you think that theme and plugin developers aren't going to but drag and drop developers will who knows we're just kind of speculating at this point so I want to hear from you I really do so if you like the video though give it a thumbs up if you're new here subscribe to the channel thank you to my patrons up above I really appreciate you guys I couldn't do it without you and really thanks to all the support you guys have shown we're at five thousand subscribers now that is definitely up was a pipe dream a year ago so I really thank you guys for showing that support but anyway I appreciate you guys watching and I will see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: WPCasts

Views: 9,216

Keywords: wordpress jobs, wordpress, freelance wordpress

Id: Jxp19Nv_8qw

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Mc_UsernameTaken]

I work for a company that mainly deals with custom development in WordPress sites, and that includes all from custom themes to custom plugins, extensions for WooCommerce and or integrations with whatever economy system (or any other 3rd part system) the client may have.

And I can only say the amount of requests we get has been steadily increasing the past 3 years.

Granted we're not freelancers, I do not think that the market for custom wordpress development will shrink or become endangered at all.

But honestly I wouldn't mind seeing the "Drag and drop developers" getting lost to WIX instead, that'd just mean less poorly made websites for me to maintain, because imo, the coding standards and attention to details with websites made using drag'n'drop and clicking around is horribly low.

[u/catdogpigduck]

The GUI's are in my opinion just as hard as coding sometimes. Just a different type of complication to make something work. I tried teaching a client how to use divi and it was too much for them.